Sunday, November 13, 2016

What Donald Trump Knew

November 13, 2016

President DJT saw one thing that most of us are still
missing. There is a huge demographic in America that consists of more-or-less
rural, kind of uneducated, predominantly white people, out in the stix
somewhere, who correctly feel that no one gives a shit about them. Their jobs
have been gone for a while; their social safety net has been shrinking; their
education was insufficient (and the education being offered to their children
IS insufficient); their towns are shrinking; their police have become predatory;
their medical care is inadequate; and their politicians mostly ignore them. At
the Federal level, both Republican and Democratic politicians have been
ignoring them for decades. In many of the towns in states that went with Donald
Trump, the biggest businesses are McDonald’s and the thrift store that sells
used clothes. If that was your family in that situation, imagine how you would
feel. That’s right, be honest. You’d be seeing red, red, red.

Those people are angry, and their anger is righteous.
Their anger, predictably, has spread far and wide in the absence of a clear
target. That was way in advance of the entry of Donald Trump into the political
arena. I don’t want to list some of the groups that they have subjected to
undeserved obloquy (they know who they are, and you do too), but the anger of
this forgotten demographic has been simmering just below a boil for some time
now.

Mr. President Donald J. Trump, most exalted ruler
(please don’t fucking sue me), saw this anger and did the math. For a man whose
usual manner of speaking marks him for an uneducated Rube himself, he did a
wonderful job of analyzing the situation. And then, on a shoe-string, and
almost alone, he set himself the task of getting elected president of the
United States. And then, poof! Like in a Harry Potter movie, there he was.
Unless somebody now figures out that the Russians hacked the voting machines,
he will be our president on January 21, 2017.

Of all of the candidates in this election, and there
were two dozen, only Trump looked this demographic in the eye and said: no one
gives a shit about you except me! I’m listening! I’ll change all of this! I’ll
give you your country (i.e., your lives) back! And his math was correct: there
were enough of them to give him the win in enough low-electoral-vote states to
win the whole prize.

Most of we coastals view the Trump voters as a bunch of
overweight Walmart shoppers who spend a lot of time either tweeking or nodding out
on Oxy. A bunch of cartoon hillbillies that wouldn’t move out of the
Bible-tornado-alley-belt even if they could afford to. In the heat of my own
anger at Trump’s election, I myself formulated the term, “The Honey Boo Boo
vote.” My head is cooler now, and I apologize for that awful characterization. It
is completely unfair to describe them all as low-functioning (that’s the politically
correct term!). If they had to get Donald Trump elected president to make their
voices heard, well, it worked. We have heard them. What we clearly need to do
now is get their lives squared away so that they can rejoin the society that has
for so long rejected them so that they will stop voting for any opportunistic
propagandist that panders to their base instincts.

The terrible truth is that Trump said a lot of terrible
things along the way to endear himself to the voters that he was courting. It
wasn’t even the more usual “dog whistle politics.” That kind of statement is
when you don’t really say something at all, but people hear it anyway. No,
Trump came right out and said things. And many things that he has done were
widely publicized, things that would prevent me from even getting some little
job somewhere. Nothing seemed to hurt him, though. He spoke directly to his
target voters and they heard him, and they desperately wanted to believe him because
they desperately needed the help.

It’s worth noting that not all Trump voters are racist
xenophobes who hate that laundry list of people that are often referred to as “the
other.” Not all of them are uneducated. Although by now it’s obvious that the
KKK, various neo-Nazi elements, hysterically anti-homosexual and anti-abortion
religious fanatics, the Russians, and yes, the Goddamned FBI, seem to all be
firmly in Trump’s corner, many of his voters were of a more reasonable type. I
know many of them; many of them were teenage friends of mine. I know them to be
otherwise reasonable people of above average intelligence. No, they're not all racist xenophobes, although they do all seem to tolerate that stuff very well.

Somehow, though, they all had a sense that something
had gone terribly wrong with America, and that only Donald Trump could set it
right. It may have been a sense of being ignored; or a sense that something had
been taken from them; or it may have been the appearance of a world that they no longer recognized. Maybe things are changing too fast for people to keep up
with it all. DJT is certainly a reactionary figure; maybe Trump voters just wanted to
take a Mulligan on the last fifty or seventy years.

The sad thing is that many Trump voters genuinely believe
that he will do what he was talking about, at least to the extent that we could
understand the vague sentences that he uttered. They seem to believe that he’s
going to help them. “Thank God for President Donald Trump!” they comment on
Facebook. Of course he will not help them. We know what his program will be.
The Paul Ryans and the Mitch McConnels of the world make no secret of their
program for the United States, and Trump has repeatedly expressed the same
sentiments. It has been the same program since that prick Reagan was elected.
The “drown the Federal Government in a bathtub” program. As Yogi Berra said so
eloquently, “it’s déjà vu all over again.” The same old voo-doo economics, and the same old "small government/states' rights" bullshit. It didn’t work for Reagan/H.W. Bush,
and it didn’t work for W. Bush, and it’s not going to work now. Watch out for
those 401k’s people! Heads-up, world economy! We’ll be lucky if this crowd doesn’t
wreck the dollar while they’re at it.

And when it happens, again, the Republicans, the new
Trump-Republican-Axis-Of-Evil, will exploit the fact that their voters are
very, very easy to fool. They will blame their failures on President Obama, or
those ineffectual semi-idiotic Democrats in Congress, or “Libtards,” or the “mainstream
media,” or God knows what all. And there is a disturbing probability that this
year’s Trump voters are such a credulous bunch that they will believe whatever
spew the Republicans and Trump throw at them, and vote for them again.

These Trump voters (I almost said, “these yokels”) will
be the gift that keeps on giving. Mark my words. Our only hope is to bring them
back into the fold and return them to some kind of secure prosperity so that
they calm the fuck down. Is that going to happen? Why no, it’s not! And I’m
afraid that many more Americans will be dragged down into Honey-Boo-Boo-Land
before this is over.

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About Me

Mr. C is: a reformed lawyer; a religious atheist; a useful "Handy Man;" an amateur social scientist; a beloved teacher; a well liked husband and father; Ambassador Emeritus from, and to, Planet X; a freelance professor; taxi driver to the stars (Joe DiMaggio and Ronald McDonald, both out of uniform); an excellent fire fighter; an enthusiastic but untalented musician; an experienced counselor; a top-notch disk jockey; an all around get-along-guy; a cunning linguist; a would-be lifestyle victim; a Masonic wannabe; a frequent reader; Professor Irwin Corey's Ph.D. adviser; an accomplished driver and motorcyclist; a famous rockologist; a reliable but indifferent bullshit detective; a poor speller; a proud United States Navy veteran (honorably discharged, barely); the Ayatollah of Ass-o-Hola; a drug legend; a Returned Peace Corps volunteer (Thailand); a generally charming man; nationally and internationally known from coast to coast; a legend in his own mind; a cultural-anthropological critic-at-large; an avenging angel who coolly bides his time; Soul Brother number 37; and a friend to the poor.